Henry Roth*

Roth, in short, was a literary refusnik. So what did all that rejecting leave him with? Very little but his "sense of life"—but that he had to a degree most writers can only dream of, and few could tolerate. I imagine (though I don't know) that that "sense of life" is what he meant to leave us with. I very much doubt Roth would have had American Type climax with a marriage. Indeed, Davidson tells us he didn't. Roth may have had a problem with the very idea of endings. In Mercy of a Rude Stream he quotes more than once a Talmudic saying to the effect that you are not required to finish, but you are not allowed to stop, either. Life, unlike fiction, has neither crisp beginnings nor redemptive endings. It endures, as Roth did, until it doesn't. The saddest ending of all would be if Roth's amorphous, neurotic, miraculously unquashable "sense of life" was precisely what got polished out of his work.

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*Ou de como as disposições de um autor podem ser destruídas pelas disposições do seu editor.